Musing on an August Day – Day 1

August Day:
You work with what you are given —
today I am blessed, today I am given luck.

It takes the shape of a dozen ripening fruit trees,
a curtain of pole beans, a thicket of berries.
It takes the shape of a dozen empty hours.

In them is neither love nor love's muster of losses,
in them there is no chance for harm or for good.
Does even my humanness matter?
A bear would be equally happy, this August day,
fat on the simple sweetness plucked between thorns.

There are some who may think, "How pitiful, how lonely."
Other must murmur, "How lazy."
I agree with them all: pitiful, lonely, lazy.
Lost to the earth and to heaven,
thoroughly drunk on its whiskeys, I wander my kingdom.

By Jane Hirshfield

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The lines from Jane Hirshfield’s poem August Days bring me back to the damp heat of summer when I was four and our old green couch was moved to the front yard. We hadn’t neighbors for miles, so there was noone to see my mother napping in the dappled shade. She lay sleeping on the worn couch, her belly bulging with my “new sister or brother.” We didn’t know which.

My mind was full of imaginary things then. And I do mean full. All that was real was in question, and all that was not was practically tangible. We had been reading Puss in Boots. That cat could talk, could trick. Ironically, our cat, Momma Cat, was also pregnant. Full of kittens, she was as heavy and lazy as my mother. I had been getting quite the life lesson on babies.

That August day I tiptoed and danced on the large, flat, semi-cool rocks outside our front door. I could almost feel my mother dreaming–probably of the new baby. After a while of playing by myself, I wanted Momma Cat to join in. I wanted her to play with me like Puss in Boots would. I must have tried to pick her up.

My mother woke to screaming.

The cat had become angry with my harassment, harmless in my eyes, and had swiped at me. Her claw tore the soft skin above my eye. I still have the scar. As one of my first memories, however, this one is not entirely bad. The image which is imprinted the darkest behind my eyelids is the soft, dappled shade, and my mother on that old green couch which transformed our front yard into a different kind of summer–lazy, slow, honey-golden days dripping sweetly toward fall.

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